Masters & Johnson. Homosexuality in Perspective. (40%+ of gays in study were sexually reoriented)

Brief Description: Between 1968 and 1977, the Masters and Johnson Institute worked with 67 clients and their opposite-sex partners who came to them for the treatment of "homosexual dissatisfaction."

Conversion or reversion to heterosexuality. enabling clients to function heterosexually, so they can then choose how they want to live. No specific attempt was made to reduce or eliminate homosexual behaviour, desires or fantasies...

... At the time of publication, follow-up ranged from 1 to 5 years. While the goal was a five year follow-up, some clients had only been treated within the past five years(pp. 400-401).

Clients who successfully completed treatment without returning to homosexuality or being "lost to follow-up":

**Minimum Final Success Rate: 43.2%**: Clients who successfully completed treatment without returning to homosexuality or being "lost to follow-up".

Reviewed and Critiqued in: Diamant 1987, Fine 1987, Gonsiorek 1981, Haldeman 1991, Haldeman 10994, Harry 1984.

There is a much better cultural,historical, and medical argument to be made, augmented by the Biblical view.

Actually, it amazes me that there has to be an argument at all. It kind of seems like arguing whether people should be having sex with goats. Part of the whole problem is that it is so obvious that homosexuality is wrong that it takes scientific gobbledygook to cloud the issue. Once some "scientist" finds a way to cloud the issue, poeple feel like they have to join the discussion instead of looking at the "scientist" and saying, "Where on earth did you dream THAT up?"

People are born in heterosexual bodies. They can sexually stimulate themselves in myriad ways, but they can only reproduce in one way - heterosexual coitus. Whether you believe we evolved from slime or were created by G-d or are the dreams of a lunatic in an asylum, there is no natural explanation for "homosexuality." Anyone who can only be erotically stimulated by members of the same sex have an obvious problem, just as someone who can only be erotically stimulated by an 18-year-old with a DD cup has a problem.

You can argue whether people with these kinds of problems should be required to undergo treatment. But you shouldn't be arguing whether people with these kinds of problems should have the option to undergo treatment. You shouldn't be arguing whether these kinds of problems should form the basis for a family. And you d*mn well shouldn't be arguing whether you should be teaching these kinds of fetishis to students in school.

It's just wrong.

Shalom.

For one, homosexuality hasn't been seen as a mental disorder for thousands of years as you claim. In fact, the word 'homosexual' is of fairly recent origin. In many, if not most, cultures in history, homosexuality has co-existed without distinction or particular persecution. You probably already know about ancient Greece.

Let me see if I've got this straight - you state that since the word 'homosexuality' has "recent" origins, ArGee's contention - that homosexuality has been seen as a disorder historically - is invalid. But your contention that in many, if not most, cultures in history, homosexuality has co-existed without distinction or particular persecution is valid? You can use the word in an historical context and it's valid, but others may not? That's very hypocritical.

Let's consider some historic documentation:

An excerpt from "Homosexuality & Same-Sex "Marriage" (Ancient Roman Satirist Slams Gays)" by Leland Peterson:

( Leland Peterson is Emeritus Professor of English and Latin at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His scholarly articles have appeared in such periodicals as Modern Philology, PMLA, and Harvard Library Bulletin. )

"True to its Jewish heritage, Christianity from the beginning has treated homosexual acts as an abomination. Christianity's judgement of homosexuality has been consistent. It remains to be seen if the Episcopal Church will be able to retain its title as a Christian denomination.
But there is a non-Christian witness from the first century A.D., that of the satirist Juvenal, whose judgements of homosexuality are consistently ignored today. A pagan's denunciations would considerably strengthen the arguments of today's Christians if they could show that non-Christians could be as strongly disgusted by homosexual acts as any Christian.
The intellectual climate of the first-century A.D. Rome had much in common with the intellectual climate of Western Civilization today, and the common link is the ancient Greek philosopher of hedonism, Epicurus. Benjamin Wiker, in a cutting-edge essay on the Epicurean-Christian conflict that appeared in this journal over four years ago ("The Christian & the Epicurean," Jul-Aug. 1999), laid the foundations for the link between Darwin and Epicurus that he elaborated on in a book three years late, Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity Press, 2002). "Epicureanism is the root of Darwinism," he argued in the book, "...which entangles nearly every aspect of our contemporary culture" by excluding the evidence of divinity in the creation, and design in Nature. Darwinian materialism has been the agent of materialism in 21st-century America that ives us a "completely Godless, soulless universe," entirely in accord with the aims of Epicurusm who believed that the good life was a liberation from any belief in gods concerned with mankind, the immortal soul, and any kind of an after-life. With the triumph of secularism has come a moral revolution bringing to the fore arguments favoring abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality.
Aware that popularization of Epicurus in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius in first-century A.D. Rome had been highly influential, Wiker credits a traditional Roman Stoicism and a nascent Christianity as the intellectual forces that eventually discredited Epicureanism until its revival centuries later in Renaissance Europe. But there was a pagan man of letters of uncommon eloquence in first-century Rome, Juvenal, whose writings were widely read by early Christians and non-Christians alike. He was keenly aware of a disastrous moral decline that he documented with an abundance of detail. His chronicle is unique in its sweep and exposure of a decadence he clearly saw as not merely scandalous, but as the onset of a moral anarchy that could lead to the downfall of civilized society. Comparing the Rome of his day with the ancient, primitive (pre-Lucretian) Republican Rome, he denounces attitudes and practices that are seen as evidence of a new moral sensitivity unique to today's secular America. Though he has as much to say about political, social, and moral corruption in general, we shall limit our observation in this essay to homosexuality and same-sex "marriage..."
We will not find in the popular press what we find in Juvenal. He alone presents us with a graphic, incriminating anal imagery to expose the practicing homosexual. Juvenal refers to morbus (disease), and observes symptoms of anemia among the homosexuals, as in the harlot denouncing the "detestable peversions" of men who are "giving tongue to each other's parts.... Your lawyer-philosopher obliges young men both ways, his versatile efforts/Turning him doubly anemic."
Same-sex "marriage" is seen as the ultimate, even blasphemous, perversion...
That a former priest of Mars now "decks himself out in bridal frills, assumes/The train and veil!" deeply repulses the satirist, who in turn, can only wonder "whence came/This prurient itch upon them? A wealthy, well-born/Man is betrothed in marriage to another man/And you [O Father of our City] do nothing." Clearly the speaker is "homophobic" if by that we mean condemnatory of anal intercourse. The more he knows, the more he condemns it.
Juvenal envisions same-sex "marriages" becoming commonplace, as a friend confides...
He foresees the time when male brides "will yearn for a mention/In the daily gazette," just like the major U.S. dailies are now formally announcing same-sex engagements and "marriages."
Same-sex "marriages" then as now had the problem of sterile intercourse, which our scientists are trying to remedy. That "gay unions" are sterile is seen by Juvenal as Nature's wisdom, though male brides "sample foreign nostrums/Guaranteed to induce conception" or else try magical fertility rites. Long before the invention of the microscope and precise knowledge of feminine ovaries, it is possible that male brides in Juvenal's time could have believed that the colon used as a vagina might have feminine properties...
As Juvenal recognized in the secularized, godless Rome of his day, same-sex "marriage" is not merely a crime against Nature and a corruption of marriage and family, not merely a symptom of moral decline, but a function of a morally sick society that includes a disease primarily transmitted by anal intercourse. At the center of the second satire, he writes that

Infection spread this plague
And will spread it further still, just as a single
Scabby sheep in the field brings death to the whole flock
Or the touch of one blighted grape will blight the bunch.

A learned commentary on these lines by Susanna Braund in her Cambridge University Press edition (1996) of Juvenal tells us that "the centre of the poem presents an image of disease and rot spreading uncontrollably from the centre outwards in images drawn from farming... and viticulture. The 'disease' here mentioned is homosexuality, not hypocrisy; contagio recalls morbum, from a context describing overt homosexuals..."

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